Telling pain where to get off

Three months ago I met a woman who had come up with a unique way of dealing with the random pain you get after breast cancer treatment.

If you’ve had breast cancer I’m pretty sure you’ll know what I mean. You have a sore rib or hip or a pain in your stomach. Immediately you decide the cancer has spread and this pain is the first sign of the end of the world.

The woman I met three months ago had breast cancer two years before me and immediately understood the random pains I talked about. She told me about her approach which had dealt to the pains. I can’t be sure of the exact wording but it went something like:“I just said ‘f**k off’ to them.”

That night I had a random pain in my side. I was just about to start my worrying routine when I remembered to try her technique.

“F**k off - you are not real,” I said.

And you know what? It f**ked right off.

I kid you not. Since that night the random pains have largely left me. I still get the odd one but for the most part something that had been pretty much a constant since my surgery has now gone.

Now, I’m aware there are a variety of factors at work here.

Firstly, enough time had probably elapsed between surgery/chemotherapy/Herceptin etc and now that the pains would be going anyway. (My specialist tells me it usually takes two to three years for all the strange pains to go.) 

Secondly, studies have shown that exercise helps reduce such pain and the amounts of exercise I have been doing in the past year has been steadily increasing as I get stronger.

Plus, I suspect that psychologically, the further away I get from my diagnosis the less likely it is I’ll even think to link random pain with cancer.

I know all that. But part of me – perhaps the part that wants to have some control over this whole cancer thing – really wants to believe that saying “f**k off” to the random pains is what really worked.